The Learning Lab

2024 will be an exciting year for the World Wide Web. 2023 saw the explosion of cultural relevance in artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Dalle, Google Bard, and others. As we continue to see a surge in the use and adoption of AI tools, we must continue enhancing our websites to leverage these tools and services. Here’s our list of things you should be looking at for 2024.

Inclusivity in web accessibility extends beyond the technical aspects of making digital content usable for people with disabilities; it also encompasses cultural sensitivity, ensuring that web experiences are welcoming and accessible to users from diverse cultural backgrounds.

Sass, the dynamic preprocessor for CSS, is not just about nesting, variables, functions, and mixins. Beyond the popular --watch flag, Sass offers a variety of lesser-known compiler flags that can optimize your development workflow. Let’s uncover these hidden features, providing insights into their uses and ideal application scenarios.

One of the most important and impactful ways to improve the maintainability of a codebase is to avoid code repetition as much as possible. By not keeping multiple copies of the same code in different places, you reduce the number of instances that must be updated if needed.

The internet has become an integral part of our lives, serving as a platform for communication, information dissemination, and interaction. As our use and the adoption of internet services continues to grow, it becomes imperative to ensure that everyone, regardless of their abilities, can access and navigate websites seamlessly. This is where website accessibility and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) step in to pave the way for a more inclusive online environment.

There will always be a need for WYSIWYG editors; they provide content editors the ability to create large blocks of paragraph-based content with common elements like lists, links, images, blockquotes, and standard formatting like bold, italics, underlines, etc. The problem most content editors will experience is that the style displayed within the editor will only sometimes display the same to end-users.

Earlier this month, Meta open-sourced their system for styling web applications. Named StyleX, this system powers the CSS for most of their public-facing properties, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and more.

In this episode of The Gorilla Learning Lab, Gabriel Crandall gives us a brief overview of StyleX, a recently released styling system developed by Meta.